A Must Read For All Of Us Who Have Opinions About Art...All Art!

I
recently attended an event at which a celebrated public radio
personality attempted to interview a celebrated artist. “Attempted,”
because he clearly did not understand her work and the spirit from which
it sprang. His attitude of not-getting-it wasn’t a storytelling device —
the kind where an interviewer feigns amicable ignorance in order to
include the audience in the finding out — but a petulant child’s fit.
The fact that he is brilliant at his own work perhaps only confounded
his frustration with not being able to understand her art, to connect
with it. The event was painful to watch because the first task of a
great interviewer is humility — sublimating his ego in the service of
letting his subject shine; the second and more arduous task is
understanding, which takes a deliberate investment of time, intention,
and effort. It was painful to watch, but also shrouded in soft pity —
endearing, because he was merely seeking to connect with her work and
needed a sherpa in understanding it. His chief fault wasn’t so much
doing it in public, without having first made those necessary
investments, but in presuming that it was the artist’s duty to be that
sherpa herself. (The artist, I should add, handled the situation with
remarkable patience and poise.)

The
task of the audience in witnessing such tragicomedy is not to judge but
to seek to understand — not to add to the effrontery by flagellating
the interviewer’s laziness of understanding with the audience’s own in
turn, but to see what went awry and glean from that a larger insight
about that delicate dance of giving and receiving, of mutual connection
and comprehension, that is art.

That is why the incident reminded me of a beautiful essay by Jeanette Wintersontitled “Art Objects,” found in her magnificent 1996 collection Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (public library),
in which she illuminates with exquisite precision the many layers of
misunderstanding that happened here, which also happen so frequently
when someone issues a dismissive or critical denunciation of art from a
deep place of I just don’t get it.

Winterson begins by recounting her own awakening to art after years of feeling no interest in the visual arts. “My lack of interest was the result of the kind of ignorance I despair of in others,” she
confesses with hindsight’s lucidity. As she finds herself in Amsterdam,
she also finds herself a stranger in a strange land in another way.
Suddenly beholding that dormant power of art, she writes:

I
had fallen in love and I had no language. I was dog-dumb. The usual
response of “This painting has nothing to say to me” had become “I have
nothing to say to this painting.” And I desperately wanted to speak.
Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign
city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a
little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art, all art, not just
painting, is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it
familiar. No-one is surprised to find that a foreign city follows its
own customs and speaks its own language. Only a boor would ignore both
and blame his defaulting on the place. Every day this happens to the
artist and the art.

We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

Winterson
begins longing for a guide, “someone astute and erudite,” “a person
dead or alive” with whom to “think things over,” and is gripped with the
way in which understanding art doesn’t obey any of our familiar
problem-solving methods. (Art, after all, is not a problem to be solved
but an experience to be allowed.) She writes:

Art
is odd, and the common method of trying to fit it into the scheme of
things, either by taming it or baiting it, cannot succeed. Who at the
zoo has any sense of the lion?

With that, Winterson considers the heart of that active surrender that art requires of us:

I
do not believe that art (all art) and beauty are ever separate, nor do I
believe that either art or beauty are optional in a sane society. That
puts me on the side of what Harold Bloom calls “the ecstasy of the
privileged moment.” Art, all art, as insight, as rapture, as
transformation, as joy. Unlike Harold Bloom, I really believe that human
beings can be taught to love what they do not love already and that the
privileged moment exists for all of us, if we let it. Letting art is
the paradox of active surrender. I have to work for art if I want art to
work on me.

She
finds her sherpa in the celebrated art critic Roger Fry and his
“life-delighting, art-delighting approach, unashamed of emotion,
unashamed of beauty” — a mind so singular that he became the subject of Virginia Woolf’s only biography. Fry, Winterson felt, allowed her to approach a work of art “without unfelt reverence or unfit complacency.”

But
art, Winterson observes, also takes time (that unfortunate interview
increasingly gave the sense that time was the missing ingredient of
understanding) and commitment. Among the essential obstacles that must
be overcome before we can begin to appreciate art, she argues, is the
experience of increasing discomfort. Noting that “ordinary life passes in a near blur” — which cognitive science has demonstrated convincingly — she asks:

When
was the last time you looked at anything, solely, and concentratedly,
and for its own sake? … We find we are not very good at looking.

We are also bedeviled by increasing irritation, which Winterson captures with wonderful humor: “Why
doesn’t the picture do something? Why is it hanging there staring at
me? What is this picture for? Pictures should give pleasure but this
picture is making me very cross. Why should I admire it? Quite clearly
it doesn’t admire me.”This notion of admiration reflected back, in
fact, is entwined with the way in which our ego — like, perhaps, the
anecdotal interviewer’s ego — is often what stands between us and the
active surrender to art. Winterson writes:

Admire
me is the sub-text of so much of our looking; the demand put on art
that it should reflect the reality of the viewer. The true painting, in
its stubborn independence, cannot do this, except coincidentally. Its
reality is imaginative not mundane.

When
the thick curtain of protection is taken away; protection of prejudice,
protection of authority, protection of trivia, even the most familiar
of paintings can begin to work its power. There are very few people who
could manage an hour alone with the Mona Lisa.

But
our poor art-lover in his aesthetic laboratory has not succeeded in
freeing himself from the protection of assumption. What he has found is
that the painting objects to his lack of concentration; his failure to
meet intensity with intensity. He still has not discovered anything
about the painting but the painting has discovered a lot about him. He
is inadequate and the painting has told him so.

It
is often said that art — some art, or much of art, or much of some of
art — is an “acquired taste.” But Winterson’s central point is that art —
all of art — is an acquired ability:

If
I can be persuaded to make the experiment again (and again and again),
something very different might occur after the first shock of finding
out that I do not know how to look at pictures, let alone how to like
them.

[…]

Art
has deep and difficult eyes and for many the gaze is too insistent.
Better to pretend that art is dumb, or at least has nothing to say that
makes sense to us. If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a
society in denial will not find much use for it… We avoid painful
encounters with art by trivializing it, or by familiarizing it.

We
are an odd people: We make it as difficult as possible for our artists
to work honestly while they are alive; either we refuse them money or we
ruin them with money; either we flatter them with unhelpful praise or
wound them with unhelpful blame, and when they are too old, or too dead,
or too beyond dispute to hinder any more, we canonize them, so that
what was wild is tamed, what was objecting, becomes Authority.
Canonizing pictures is one way of killing them. When the sense of
familiarity becomes too great, history, popularity, association, all
crowd in between the viewer and the picture and block it out. Not only
pictures suffer like this, all the arts suffer like this.

The
calling of the artist, in any medium, is to make it new. I do not mean
that in new work the past is repudiated; quite the opposite, the past is
reclaimed. It is not lost to authority, it is not absorbed at a level
of familiarity. It is re-stated and re-instated in its original vigor.
Leonardo is present in Cézanne, Michelangelo flows through Picasso and
on into Hockney. This is not ancestor worship, it is the lineage of art.
It is not so much influence as it is connection…

The
true artist is connected. The true artist studies the past, not as a
copyist or a pasticheur will study the past, those people are interested
only in the final product, the art object, signed sealed and delivered
to a public drugged on reproduction. The true artist is interested in
the art object as an art process, the thing in being, the being of the
thing, the struggle, the excitement, the energy, that have found
expression in a particular way. The true artist is after the problem.
The false artist wants it solved (by somebody else). If the true artist
is connected, then he or she has much to give us because it is
connection that we seek. Connection to the past, to one another, to the
physical world… A picture, a book, a piece of music, can remind me of
feelings, thinkings, I did not even know I had forgot.

Whether
art tunnels deep under consciousness or whether it causes out of its
own invention, reciprocal inventions that we then call memory, I do not
know. I do know that the process of art is a series of jolts, or perhaps
I mean volts, for art is an extraordinarily faithful transmitter. Our
job is to keep our receiving equipment in good working order.

With
this, Winterson arrives at the crux of our difficulty with
understanding art and our tendency to mistake our misunderstanding for a
failure of the art, to presume that our problem with understanding it
is the artist’s problem — the heart of what went awry in that
unfortunate interview. Winterson writes:

There
are no Commandments in art and no easy axioms for art appreciation. “Do
I like this?” is the question anyone should ask themselves at the
moment of confrontation with the picture. But if “yes,” why “yes”? and
if “no,” why “no”? The obvious direct emotional response is never
simple, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the “yes” or “no” has
nothing at all to do with the picture in its own right.

“I don’t understand this poem”“I never listen to classical music”“I don’t like this picture”are
common enough statements but not ones that tell us anything about
books, painting, or music. They are statements that tell us something
about the speaker. That should be obvious, but in fact, such statements
are offered as criticisms of art, as evidence against, not least because
the ignorant, the lazy, or the plain confused are not likely to want to
admit themselves as such. We hear a lot about the arrogance of the
artist but nothing about the arrogance of the audience. The audience,
who have not done the work, who have not taken any risks, whose life and
livelihood are not bound up at every moment with what they are making,
who have given no thought to the medium or the method, will glance up,
flick through, chatter over the opening chords, then snap their fingers
and walk away like some monstrous Roman tyrant.

Winterson adds a reflection on the elements of subjectivity and our duty in factoring it in:

An
examination of our own feelings will have to give way to an examination
of the piece of work. This is fair to the work and it will help to
clarify the nature of our own feelings; to reveal prejudice, opinion,
anxiety, even the mood of the day. It is right to trust our feelings but
right to test them too. If they are what we say they are, they will
stand the test, if not, we will at least be less insincere.

When you say “This work has nothing to do with me.” When you say “This work is boring/pointless/silly/obscure/élitist
etc.,” you might be right, because you are looking at a fad, or you
might be wrong because the work falls so outside of the safety of your
own experience that in order to keep your own world intact, you must
deny the other world of the painting. This denial of imaginative
experience happens at a deeper level than our affirmation of our daily
world. Every day, in countless ways, you and I convince ourselves about
ourselves. True art, when it happens to us, challenges the “I” that we
are.

A love-parallel would be just;
falling in love challenges the reality to which we lay claim, part of
the pleasure of love and part of its terror, is the world turned upside
down. We want and we don’t want, the cutting edge, the upset, the new
views. Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional environment just as
we work hard at taming our aesthetic environment. We already have tamed
our physical environment. And are we happy with all this tameness? Are
you?

[…]

The
solid presence of art demands from us significant effort, an effort
anathema to popular culture. Effort of time, effort of money, effort of
study, effort of humility, effort of imagination have each been packed
by the artist into the art.

And
this, I suppose was the effrontery of the interviewer: his public
admission of not having made the effort — of not having cared to make
it. Winterson touches on what the deeper reason might be:

I
worry that to ask for effort is to imply élitism, and the charge
against art, that it is élitist, is too often the accuser’s defense
against his or her own bafflement.

The
fashion for dismissing a thing out of ignorance is vicious. In fact, it
is not essential to like a thing in order to recognize its worth, but
to reach that point of self-awareness and sophistication takes years of
perseverance.

The problem, she points out, isn’t one of personal failure but of cultural bias:

I
am sure that if as a society we took art seriously, not as mere
decoration or entertainment, but as a living spirit, we should very soon
learn what is art and what is not art.

[…]

If
we sharpened our sensibilities, it is not that we would all agree on
everything, or that we would suddenly feel the same things in front of
the same pictures (or when reading the same book), but rather that our
debates and deliberations would come out of genuine aesthetic
considerations and not politics, prejudice and fashion… And our hearts?
Art is aerobic.

Winterson
turns to what happens in that magical moment when a work of art is
beheld with understanding, with active surrender, and enveloped by
receptivity:

There
is a constant exchange of emotion between us, between the three of us;
the artist I need never meet, the painting in its own right, and me, the
one who loves it and can no longer live independent of it. The triangle
of exchange alters, is fluid, is subtle, is profound and is one of
those unverifiable facts that anyone who cares for painting soon
discovers… The totality of the picture comments on the totality of what I
am.

As
she considers how art makes visible “those necessary invisibles of
faith and optimism, humor and generosity,” “the sublimity of mankind,”
she peers into the depths of its essence:

We
know that the universe is infinite, expanding and strangely complete,
that it lacks nothing we need, but in spite of that knowledge, the
tragic paradigm of human life is lack, loss, finality, a primitive
doomsaying that has not been repealed by technology or medical science.
The arts stand in the way of this doomsaying. Art objects. The nouns
become an active force not a collector’s item. Art objects.

The
cave wall paintings at Lascaux, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the huge
truth of a Picasso, the quieter truth of Vanessa Bell, are part of the
art that objects to the lie against life, against the spirit, that it is
pointless and mean. The message colored through time is not lack, but
abundance. Not silence but many voices. Art, all art, is the
communication cord that cannot be snapped by indifference or disaster.
Against the daily death it does not die.

[…]

Art
is not a little bit of evolution that late-twentieth-century city
dwellers can safely do without. Strictly, art does not belong to our
evolutionary pattern at all. It has no biological necessity. Time taken
up with it was time lost to hunting, gathering, mating, exploring,
building, surviving, thriving. Odd then, that when routine physical
threats to ourselves and our kind are no longer a reality, we say we
have no time for art. If we say that art, all art is no longer relevant
to our lives, then we might at least risk the question “What has
happened to our lives?” The usual question, “What has happened to art?”
is too easy an escape route.